Hello Dolly!
by cagd
Summary: Everything has a purpose, even a golem
1. Chapter 1

Glass eyes in painted sockets opened and shut in the semi-darkness.

There were children near.

Many children.

Painted hands stiffly flexed, testing old joints in the wrists, elbows, shoulders, hips and knees.

Children were what it had been made for.

The tinkle of glass as it shattered, raining down on the polished floor, an alarm going off, feet running towards, drowning out the slight patter of tiny feet in kidskin boots.

It had to find the children.

Children were what it had been made for.

The security guard who had been leaning against the front desk of the hospital talking up the nurses at four in the morning ran into the room, nightstick out; there was no intruder, only a fan of broken glass on the floor of the case which had held a priceless antique German doll, the crown jewel of the antique toy exhibition fundraiser sponsored by DataCorp.

Somewhere, light footsteps pattered through the hallways of the big hospital complex, searching for children…


	2. Chapter 2

Janine Melnitz had heard a lot of things, but this was new: some supervising nurse at New York Presbyterian Hospital thought she saw a rat in the Pediatric Burn Unit and wanted the Ghostbusters to deal with it.

"No ma'am, we don't do rodents – it has to be dead but still moving around for us to even make a basic service call."

Bored, Janine rolled her eyes as the woman went on.

"Have you tried an exterminator?"

Janine added another word to the crossword puzzle she'd been working on all morning, "lunatic". And that's what the woman on the other end of the phone obviously was – Janine was good at sorting out lunatics: her employers attracted a lot of 'em. She added "absurd" to 5 down, blowing and then popping a bubble at the same as she wrote.

Her pencil snapped at "foolishness" gum falling out of her mouth, "The rat was wearing a dress and a curly wig?" She picked up a fresh pencil and wrote down the address, "They'll be right over – and yes, they'll be discreet."


	3. Chapter 3

Which of course they weren't, pulling up at the front door of the massive complex, siren blaring, but going almost unnoticed in the unexpected tangle of police cars and news vans blocking the front entrance.

"Hey, they told us to be discreet, but somebody else beat us to it," Peter quipped as he climbed out of the driver's seat, "Is that the nurse that wanted to see us?" He pointed at a tall blonde in scrubs standing nervously off to one side of the crowd of police, bystanders and reporters. He waved as Ray joined him, adjusting his proton pack.

The nurse came over, nervously pulling them aside, "Your secretary said you'd be descreet!"

"Honey, this is discreet, for us – I don't think anybody noticed us what with all the hub-bub already here – what's up?" Peter leaned read her nametag, "Phyllis."

"Some rare toy got stolen from the fund-raiser displayed in the lobby earlier this morning. Will you come with me, and PLEASE, try to be quiet? The janitor has it cornered in one of the conference rooms in Pediatrics.

"Sure, we'll take care of your "rat" problem. Hey, Egon," Peter added as they stepped into a side entrance, "Any readings so far?"


	4. Chapter 4

Whatever it was, it moved fast and only gave off the faintest of PKE readings.

It scuttled under the table which Winston and Ray overturned with a bang as they tried to get at it – Phyllis forbidding them to use their proton guns for fear it might set off the fire alarms.

"Hey, whoah, there it went!"

"Yow." Egon stumbled, trying to avoid stepping on it, overbalanced and went down, taking a picture off of the wall as he tried to catch himself, "Still not much of an energy reading, but it's not a rat!"

"Geez, Janine was right, whatever it is, it's wearing clothes!" Peter made a lunge, taking out a chair and the remaining picture as he missed, "Ray, I got it cornered!"

"Don't look now, Peter, it just ran up your leg!"

"Argh, I do not need rat bites _there_, get it off! Get it off!" Peter spun, leaving a divot in the beige carpeting and fell into the door, which should have been firmly shut but wasn't.

The door flew open, and the well-dressed rat, or whatever it was, dropped to the floor, and shot out into the hall. Winston grabbed a waste paper basket along the way as they chased it through several swinging doors before erupting into an open area.

The rat stopped in the middle of the toy-cluttered room, a television mounted high on the wall playing Sesame Street. Several children in wheelchairs trailing IVs looked up, openmouthed before screaming, "Ghostbusters!"

The rat stood on its hind legs, head swiveling left and right. As the children watched, Winston brought the wastebasket down on what now looked more like a large doll than a rat and sat on it. "Gotcha!"

The children started clapping and cheering, thinking it had all been a show put on for their benefit.


	5. Chapter 5

There had been a bit of trouble with hospital Security: their loud chase down the hallway had set off several alarms. Winston sat with arms folded on the overturned wastebasket as whatever it was they'd caught scrabbled to get out while the children had crowded around them - toys and Big Bird forgotten in their quest for autographs.

Egon was down on his knees, fending off small hands clutching crayons as he tried to take more accurate readings of what they had caught.

Ray had given up entirely, and sat down on the floor with two kids on his lap and one on his shoulders, signing casts and answering questions, a broad grin on his boyish face while Peter and Phyllis dealt with Security and the rest of the nurses on duty.

"What a bunch of grouches!" Peter said as the last security guard left the room, "And no rat bites on my you know what – yo, Egon, whatcha got there?"

Egon looked up from his crouch, adjusted his glasses where they'd been knocked askew while ignoring the child in a shoulder cast who was sitting on his back eating a cookie, "I don't know Peter, but I suggest we evacuate this area before Winston stands up so we can safely remove it."

"All right kids, visit's over – the Ghostbusters have work to do now!" Phyllis clapped her hands, "And we need to go back to our rooms for a little while so they can take care of things!"

To universal "Awwwwws!" the children were herded back into their rooms and all the doors to the playroom locked, "Bye kids, we'll be back later!" Ray called, handing a child with heavily bandaged hands to one of the nurses, "Promise!"

_"Ray!"_

"Peter, these kids have had it rough, I don't mind making a visit now and then!"

"Egon, did you bring a trap?"

"No, Peter," Egon stood, dusting off his knees, "It's your turn this time."

Which of course meant that Winston spent another twenty minutes sitting on the wastebasket while somebody went back to Ecto 1 to get a trap."


	6. Chapter 6

"5. 4.3. 2… Winston, now!" Ray called as he tripped the trap, which lay on its side on the bright pink and purple carpet beside the wastebasket.

Winston dove out of the way, wastepaper basket flying off to one side with a clang, the doors flew open… and Ray took his foot off the switch, "What the… a DOLLIE?"


	7. Chapter 7

"You called us to come remove a… a… a… possessed toy?" Peter sputtered, "That'll be double!"

"Settle down, Peter," Egon looked up from _Tobin's Spirit Guide_, "Not just any possessed toy, but a Golem – one of the Dresden Seven, if I'm any judge."

"Ignore, Peter, Phyllis, " Winston added from where he knelt beside the doll, which was about a foot and a half tall, and dressed in enough frills and ruffles to decorate every lampshade in south Jersey, "He gets like that when somebody takes away his toys."

Phyllis was sitting on the edge of a child-sized table, staring down at the porcelain headed doll, which looked back up at her with bright blue glass eyes."

"But that's the doll everybody's been looking for downstairs – it's a valuable antique!" She covered her eyes briefly with one hand and shook her head before adding, "At least it's not a rat."

"No." Egon slid the book back in a cargo pocket, "It's not a rat, it's a golem; one of a set of seven presumed mostly destroyed February of 1945 during the massive bombing which leveled the city. In 1910, Rabbi Eliyahu ben Hezalel, the brother-in-law of a well-known German doll manufacturer created them to watch over the children in his neighborhood in 1910, only he died before he could finish the project, only having brought one to life. The _Guide_ says all seven lay in their boxes for over thirty years in the attic of what had been his synagogue…" Egon sat down on the floor beside the doll, which turned to face him, "Let me examine your forehead."

The doll paused; one tiny hand raised the curls on its forehead.

"I was right." Egon ran his PKE meter up and down the tiny figure, "There's the mark of a Holy Name on this thing's forehead, and the porcelain acts as an damper for any PKE readings it might give off."

"But I thought golems were supposed to be big, ugly things, like walking piles of mud!" Ray got down on his hands and knees beside Egon, "But you're cute!" He cooed, holding out a finger. "Aren't you, baby?"

"Careful Ray, we don't know what this thing might do…" Egon edged back as the doll raised its hands and took Ray's finger in them, head tilted to one side, ringlets shifting beneath its elaborate bonnet. "You want me to go somewhere with you, don'tcha cutie?"

"Ray, this isn't a good idea. If you ask me…" Peter said to nobody in particular as the doll lead Ray to the door which led into one of the wards, "But you never asked me, so why don't I just shut up?"

The doll pushed at the door.

"You want in there. Is it all right?" Ray asked Phyllis who had followed them from a safe distance, stepping over blocks and coloring books.

The doll looked up at Ray and then the nurse.

"I'm afraid to risk it."

"We're right here, should anything go wrong."

The nurse turned and surveyed the tipped over wastebasket and the carpet strewn with traps and discarded toys, "All right."

She reached for her keys, unlocked the door, opened it, and stepped aside.

The doll paused, looking back at them briefly before pattering into the pediatric oncology ward.


	8. Chapter 8

A few hours later found them watching the doll, no, the _golem_ as it pattered up and down the hallway, stepping into a room here, retrieving up a dropped toy there, and scrambling up a bedframe to sit on the lap of a child or another.

The owner had been contacted and was with them as they followed it around, "It's the keystone, the jewel of my collection – I only lent the doll and the rest of my collection of jointed and mechanical toys to the hospital as part of a fundraiser, I didn't know it would get up and walk away – my products don't even do that!"

"I suspect that if you tried to remove it as is, it would only escape and return here, now that it's been activated, however _that_ happened." Egon added, "And we all know how the Golem of Prague went on a rampage – I advise having the mark removed by a Rabbi before putting it back in the display case."

"That would ruin the overall value of the doll… I never noticed the mark, even when I had a conservator remove it from the sealed box it was found laying in on a pile of bricks where the Synagogue had been. The mark was there the whole time…" The owner of one of the largest robotics firms in the United States gave them all an odd smile, "And if I could use…"  
"No!" Egon interrupted him, "I wouldn't advise it."

They all paused as a beaming little girl with a stubbly head was pushed past them in a wheelchair, the golem in her lap.

"How could you take it away from the kids, they love it!" Ray shifted uncomfortably, "Did you see that one kid who lost a leg when it handed him a juice box… I say leave it here and let it do what it was created for!"

"How could I? It's irreplaceable. Besides it cost me…" The president and founder of DataCorp named a sum that rocked everyone back, "I'm a rich man, but I can't waste money!"

After a long silence, Egon murmured, "I could do without a research budget for…" he pulled out a calculator, "Approximately 4.5 years."

"I could take a pay cut." Winston added quietly.

"We could do without a new roof, and I'm sure Janine wouldn't mind not getting a raise for the third year in a row." Ray ventured. They all looked at Peter.

"Peter, how 'bout it?" Winston asked. "It's for the kids!"

Peter scowled, "All right, I can do without a paid vacation." He looked at the rightful owner, "But I have a better idea, though…"


	9. Chapter 9

Not long afterwards, there was an article in the _Times_, one which told how the founder and CEO of DataCorp was now using New York Presbyterian Hospital pediatric ward to field test a new robot – one designed to look like a toy to avoid frightening the children it was to interact with - a doll, to be precise.


End file.
